Imbued in gangster-noir ambiance from the start, one expects Prohibition-era shootouts, hardboiled men of action, and gorgeously cynical cigarette-smoking women from Motherless Brooklyn. Indeed, the opening chapter is classic:
We were putting a stakeout on 109 East Eighty-fourth street, a lone town house pinned between giant doorman apartment buildings, in and out of the foyers of which bicycle deliverymen with bags of hot Chinese flitted like tired moths in the fading November light.
So it is startling to discover in the second chapter that it is not set in the pre-WWII era, but is set in the 1970s. This is not the only unexpected update to this satisfyingly unusual genre novel. Its protagonist Lionel Essrog suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, and the novel is written entirely in his voice. The narrator, in this instance, has verbal issues and a delightful turn of phrase.
Lionel, my name. Frank and the Minna Men pronounced it to rhyme with vinyl. Lionel Essrog. Line-all.
Liable Guesscog.
Final Escrow.
Ironic Pissclaim.
And so on.
My one name was the original verbal taffy, by now stretched to filament-thin threads that lay all over the floor of my echo-chamber skull. Slack, the flavor all chewed out of it.
Lionel is an orphan, abandoned as a baby at St. Vincent’s Home for Boys in Brooklyn. Frank Minna, the local mobster, comes by to pick up some helpers, and Lionel, in his teens, gets taken along with Tony Vermonte, Gilbert Coney and Danny Fantl to load and unload boxes. These four boys, later to pridefully call themselves ‘Minna Men’, feel chosen, and see these intermittent outings as an opening of future possibilities.
Jonathan Lethem does a masterful job of outlining each character.
Tony Vermonte was famous at St. Vincent’s for the confidence he exuded, confidence that a mistake had been made, that he didn’t belong in the Home. He was Italian, better than the rest of us, who didn’t know what we were (what’s an Essrog?) His father was either a mobster or a cop — Tony saw no contradiction in this, so we didn’t either. […]
Minna was barely a man then himself, of course, though he seemed one to us. He was twenty-five that summer, gangly except for a tiny potbelly in his pocket-T, and still devoted to combing his hair into a smooth pompadour, a Carroll Gardens hairstyle that stood completely outside that year of 1979, projecting instead from some miasmic Sinatra moment that extended like a bead of amber or a cinematographer’s filter to enclose Frank Minna and everything that mattered to him. […]
Gilbert then was Tony’s right hand, a stocky sullen boy just passing for tough — he would have beamed at you for calling him a thug. […]
That first chapter, as I said, is classic: a stakeout, a car chase, a body, a hospital. Who killed Frank, and why? Lionel, driven to find order in his internal and external world, needs to find out.
The plot, though, is almost a sidenote. Yes, there are other Mafiosi after Lionel and the Minna Men. Perhaps some of the Minna Men themselves are or will betray the group. There is a Japanese conglomerate lurking in the shadows. And there is a young woman, Kimmery, for whom Lionel will undoubtedly carry a torch. Lionel inches towards identifying the reason for Minna’s death, but the real focus here is on his own journey.
Developing Tourette’s in the roughhouse of an orphanage is pretty brutal
By the time I was twelve, […] I had begung to overflow with reaching, tapping, grabbing and kissing urges — those compulsions emerged first, while language for me was still trapped like a roiling ocean under a calm floe of ice. […] Leshawn Montrose cracked my head against a porcelain water fountain, Greg Toon and Edwin Torres generously only shucked me off onto the floor. […]
Meanwhile, beneath that frozen shell a sea of language was reaching full boil. […] I collected words, treasured them like a drooling sadistic captor, bending them, melting them down, filing off their edges, stacking them into teetering piles […]
Minna’s patronage helps.
And Minna loved my effect on his clients and associates, the way I’d unnerve them, disrupt some schmooze with an utterance, a head jerk, a husky “Eatmebailey!” I was his special effect, a running joke embodied.
As we come to realize, the Minna Men and their familiar acceptance of Lionel’s Tourette’s is the closest he has to a family.
Brooklyn is an ever-present character in this novel:
We’d load merchandise in and out of storefront-basement grates all up and down Court Street[…], or bustle apartmentloads of furniture in and out of brownstone walkups. A massive factory building under the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge, owned by an important but unseen friend of Minna’s, had been damaged in a fire, and we moved most of the inhabitants for free. We woke at five one August morning to collect and set up the temporary wooden stages for the bands performing in the Atlantic Antic, a massive annual street fair, then worked again at dusk to tear the stages down, the hot avenue now heaped with a day’s torn wrappers and crumpled cups, a few revelers still staggering home as we knocked the pine frames apart with hammers and the heels of our shoes.
I must admit to being comfortably detached from the plot; whether Frank Minna was killed by other mobsters or the Japanese or one of his own protégés seemed of little import. In the end, the novel comes to a somewhat fuzzy conclusion, and many smaller threads are left hanging: who were Lionel’s parents, for example? But there is much else to appreciate in this novel: the wordplay, the interior monologue of a thoughtful, intelligent man and the imaginative original humour of his Tourette’s brain.
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